P.E. Kavanagh's Blog, page 5

The Answer to ‘Why Me?’

I belong to many online writer’s groups, but hardly participate in most of them.

I decided to do some culling. To streamline (again) what’s coming into my inbox every day and remove myself from the information streams in which the material doesn’t add to my life.

I went on one of the sites in question, trying to figure out how to cancel my membership, and was drawn into the featured story that month. A (grown) man had written a lengthy essay about his disappointing experiences as a wannabe writer and the frank responses he received from other writers. He had reached out to some established writers with his material, and received critical responses, or no response at all. He was bitter.

Here’s what really struck me:

The time he spent writing that piece, easily the length of a substantial blog post or article, about how he wasn’t getting any support from the writers he knew, could have so easily been spent making or refining his art. Instead, he chose to bitch and moan about how hard it all was. And how people were harsh with him.

I read the article with rising levels of disgust. It had the pull of a gruesome accident on the side of the road. I could not turn away, even as I felt myself experiencing every negative emotion I could muster.

It was so bad that I even read the comments. All of them. Not a single person said, “Hey buddy, did you read somewhere that being a writer was easy? That you should be lauded by Stephen King, Oprah and the Dalai Lama just because you know how to type? How about putting on your big-boy pants, growing a set, and actually doing the work because it’s what you claim to love? How about dropping the poor-me, why-me, entitlement bullshit and creating something?”

Frankly, that’s all I wanted to see. Because this man, who received a flurry of cyber hugs and pats on the back, will never succeed with that attitude (IMHO). Maybe he is actually very talented, and the world will never know it because he’s so angry about people in his life not coddling him like an infant.

He wanted to feel justified in his pursuit of an activity in which failures outnumber successes by a ridiculous proportion. He wanted the people who succeeded before him to say, “It was so easy! Of course you can do it!” The actual truth of the matter – apparently irrelevant.

I get the irony of my writing an article complaining about complaining. I understand sometimes we just need someone to hear our whines and groans before we can move on to bigger things.

What most of us really need, in my personal perspective, is to understand that the process of growing into who we could be is never comfortable. That following our soul’s calling is a rocky, windy, uphill road.

Let’s all get over the life-sucking idea that anybody owes us anything, shall we? Tweet that.

I unsubscribed. In the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

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It’s easy to get stuck in the ‘why me’ mindset. There seems to be abundant support for that kind of behavior. But there’s an alternative.

Realize that the hero or heroine you are waiting for is actually in your shoes, right now.

This fall, I’m launching a program directed at just this issue.

The AAA Plan for Self-Rescue is a 40-day online experience for dissatisfied seekers ready to provide their own soul-side assistance and free themselves from the binds of suffering. When I say suffering, I mean sadness, anger, grief, discontent and resentment.

On the surface, it’s about shifting perspective using Awareness, Alignment and Activation – The AAA Plan – but really it’s about shifting over to the driver’s seat of your life.

You’re in the right place. Let me help. Find out more here.

I Am…

Mermaid Mother and Child by Shijun Munns

I am…

I am crazy, funny

I wonder about the future

I hear the whispers in the winds

I see the mermaids tail swooshing in the water

I want to be happy

I am crazy, funny

 

I pretend to be a wizard

I feel the unicorn’s horn brush my back

I touch my dreams

I worry about school

I cry for help

I am crazy, funny

 

I understand importance

I say friends are all you need

I dream for a better tomorrow

I try to be the only bliss

I hope for equality

 

Written by Sofi Bliss Ayling, age 11

 

 

The Antidote to Discontent
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Interested in feeling more contented and connected? Learn how to master The Inner Game of Success with my FREE 3-part course right here.

The Gift of Confusion

No one likes to be confused. (I took a poll… it’s unanimous.) A very famous motivational speaker and teacher would have his large audiences clap vigorously whenever someone said the words, “I am confused.” It was confusing.

Eventually, I (and the rest of the observers to his life-changing methods) figured out that the state of confusion can be a great gift. It is the sensation of your brain (and maybe even your heart) stretching past its previous boundaries.

I’ve spent a great deal of my life confused. This guy or that, this job or that, this dress or that. Digesting life as one choice after another makes for quite a bit of uncertainty.

It can also mean that that we become aware that we are making choices, as opposed to being forced, directed or victimized. From that perspective, it’s a position of power and sovereignty.

This feels much better than the alternative.

When the view is hazy, do you curse what you cannot see or praise what will eventually reveal itself? Tweet that. What a difference a choice makes!

In my current situation, with my new progressive glasses, the difference between fuzzy and clear is a shift of a couple of millimeters. Funnily enough, so it is in life as well. When we overreact to not seeing clearly, we take drastic measures, which almost never prove fruitful. In fact, they typically require compensating in the opposite direction. Sometimes several times.

Taking that tiny movement between confusion and clarity conserves energy and equilibrium, while taking us to the preferred outcome with the greatest grace. Embracing our position as the director relieves us from the powerlessness that always threatens to consume us.

Every piece of data we accumulate of our own stewardship of this gift of a life reinforces our ability to make and take the next step. We grow our capabilities, our confidence and our comfort with what lies outside of our immediate focus. That, my friends, isn’t blurry at all.

What’s out of focus for you now? What is the smallest step you can take toward resolution? Share with me below.

That sensation you’re feeling? It’s your brain expanding. Cool, right?

 

 

The Antidote to Discontent
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Interested in feeling more contented and connected? Learn how to master The Inner Game of Success with my FREE 3-part course right here.

 

Spiritual AND Sexy

Spiritual AND sexy? You bet.

Over the past 18 months, I wrote a book. In my spare time. It is the story of three spirited sisters, two Latin lovers and one morose mermaid. It is an erotic novel.

‘What??!!” you might be asking.

I expected that.

Although it is (much) different than the work most of you know me for, this project was one of the most joy-filled and, frankly, titillating things I’ve ever done. It was an enormous amount of fun and now it lives in the world.

If you are interested in those kinds of things, (don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone) I’d love for you to check it out. Find out more here.

In case you’re still in shock, I’ve gifted you a mostly G-rated section as an enticing taster. Check it out here. Please note that the rest of the work is for adult eyes only!

I’m excited. (No pun intended.) I’d love to know what you think.

Perspective

Perspective is life changing. It’s in my core beliefs here, and I write about it here and here. That lesson is perhaps one of the most consistent aspects of my life.

It reappeared just recently as I sat on a cross country flight in front of a little boy who was having a hard time. Especially during the landing, his discomfort got the best of him.

He was crying and screaming about the pain in his ears, something I am quite familiar with both personally and as a mother. His own mother stayed calm and loving, giving him suggestions to ease the pressure and pain.  As I felt my own sadness around his suffering, especially my inability to ease it in any way, I began to see the situation as much more than just this boy and his pain. Here’s the scenario that played in my head as I imagined the inner experience of both of the participants:

Child: Oh my God!!! What’s happening here? This airplane is trying to kill me! Why won’t anybody make it stop! This is the worst thing that has ever happened. I’m going to die!  

Mom: My child is suffering but I know it is temporary. I wish he could see that. As soon as we are back on the ground, he will be fine. This situation, painful as it is, will not harm him. It’s just a normal part of flying for many people. I offer him some ways to feel better, but he cannot hear me. He is in such distress that he won’t do the things I know can help him.

When I heard the situation around me in this extracted form, it’s as if all the lights of Times Square lit up at once. That is the process of suffering isn’t it?

Substitute YOU for the child, and God/Allah/Shiva/The Universe/Mother Earth for the mother. The true source of our distress comes not from the pain we experience, but of the thoughts we have behind the pain, and the counterproductive reactions that prevent the healing that would come naturally, to come at all.

The child represents our developmental state when we cannot see clearly. When our perspective is limited and we give weight to some things and not others. This is not a judgment or indictment. It is an expected step in the process of spiritual and psychological maturation.

The mother represents the inherent knowing and wisdom that fills the space around us, and that (in time) also lives within us.   Can you see an instance (or two) in your life where you where the child? Or even where you were the mother? The truth is that we are both. Perhaps there are times where you are grounded and clear and can provide support to someone in distress, or even hold a non-judgmental space for their experience.

Almost certainly, there are times when we are like the panicked swimmer, whose flailing prevents the lifeguard from rescuing him, or the child in severe discomfort who cannot understand why it is happening, or when it will end. I know I have personally held both roles, and spent more time in the latter than the former.

The lives we think we are living are actually the stringing together of the thoughts and stories we create, not necessarily the events that took place.  Perspective is the ability to discern between the two. To believe, ‘This might be painful, but it is temporary’ or ‘Within this difficulty also lies the wisdom to transcend it’ can make the difference between sitting in the seat of child or the seat of the mother.

In the words of a yoga teacher from my youth (and any Buddhist):   Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

To which I would add:   Everything in life can be changed by perspective. Tweet that.

 

How can you apply that to your life today?

 

Interested in feeling more content and connected? Learn how to master The Inner Game of Success with my FREE 3-part course right here.

A Warrior Am I

A warrior am I  and from the battle  I emerge victorious.
Courtesy of my reading from astrologist Heidi Rose Robbins
 

The concept of being a warrior plays hide-and-seek with my psyche. I am repulsed and infatuated at the same time. It is exhausting waging war all the time, and yet, what else is an awakened life, than the casting off of the layers of delusion and the slaying of legions of ghosts?

I practice Warrior 1, 2 and 3 hundreds (thousands?) of times, and I find discomfort every time. Peace comes easily. Battles do not.

There’s a reason we practice being warriors. There’s a reason the world asks us to be stronger, braver, and kinder than we think we can be. It’s the Universe’s plead for us to finally look in the correct mirror. Not the one that demonstrates our flaws, our failures and our fleeting being. The one that shows us the power to light what is around us, like a single small candle on a dark night.

I fight for my calling. I fight for my daughter. I fight for my heart and my body to be treated how I want them to be. I fight against the relentless pull to do and be what the world deems appropriate.

My mind says, “I am too old, too tired, too weak, too wrong, to keep outfitting myself in the cloak and armor required to slay my demons.”

And yet… A warrior am I and from the battle I emerge victorious.

Sometimes we must coddle our darkness into reality. But only long enough for it to dissolve in the blinding light of our brightness.

Take those ideas of limitation and raise your sword to them. En garde!! you must say. And then slash them as if they were made of the thinnest tissue. Don’t fear for their suffering. They have bound you long enough.

Your victories are indisputable. 

Can you begin to see the warrior with blood on her hands and hope in her heart, standing at their center? Can you see the hero, bruised and breathless, arms raised, muscles rippling, knowing the strength was there all along?

Tell me, won’t you please, what your warrior is battling today.

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A Song And A Storm

I Live My Life In Widening Circles
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

2013

I am a great song. My music is grand and soft, harmonious and discordant, all in turn. My words describe a life and all lives, in their poetry and symmetry and simplicity.

I am the rhythm of an ocean wave, a beating heart, a cycle of breath. I cycle and repeat like the planets and galaxies and all the universes that have been and will be.

There is suffering and victory, banality and redemption, divinity and chaos. Can you hear the melody, hummed between your own lips, or the words vibrating in your thoughts? Are you in time, in harmony or in round?

The song is sung, not by me, but through me. My emptiness is the chamber in which vibration becomes sound becomes meaning. What you hear is my space and your space, my wounds and your wounds, my song and your song. 

Is it a symphony or a cacophony? 
Is it deafening or ecstatic? 
Can you hear it?
 
2014
I only ever saw the sweetness of the song before now.

In this moment, the storm within me sings the loudest. She is the pulse, the energy, the electricity built over a lifetime of holding. The gathering clouds may appear to be darkening the sky, but in truth they are the soul’s washcloth, ready to scrub clean whatever needs it.

Like Shiva, it’s not all about destruction. It’s about making space for what needs to be born. It’s about whitening the palette so that the colors are no longer muddy and dull. It’s about pushing against the universe’s drive towards entropy so that what is soft and still and quiet can find a patch of earth to root.

Maybe I will pull up trees, tumble the seas and shake what should not have been built. Savor the possibility of starting again, and starting again, like the inhale that must follow an exhale.

Don’t be afraid.

Let it rain.

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What We See: A Practice in Choosing

My daughter is messy. Very messy. It never crosses her mind to pick up the clothes she flings on the floor, to put away her plate or cup, or to clean off her desk so there’s actually a usable surface. We live in a small space so everything is amplified, and minor messes become unmanageable very quickly.

For the past 5 days there has been a hot pink bra lying in the middle of my cream-colored living room. Each of the 100 times I walk by it, I wonder how it is she does not see it. It is the brightest thing in the whole house. I’m tired of asking, begging, pleading, threatening and otherwise expending energy on it. I want the owner to pick it up, without one more word from me.

As a child, I was infinitely worse than my daughter. I don’t believe anyone saw the carpet in my room during the 10 years I lived in my last childhood house. My parents also gave up… on many things, actually. I would get an occasional request to clean up, which I could easily ignore. Even my friends’ taunts weren’t enough to change my behavior.

When I was a teenager, our house was broken into and ransacked. We stood, shaken and traumatized as the police checked around the house. The first floor was an absolute disaster. When they returned from upstairs, they indicated it had not been as badly damaged, except for one room, which appeared to be the hardest hit. We all ran up to check our bedrooms, as the officer pointed to the right. Yes, it was my room. and it was completely unchanged from how I left it.

The joke, when we were able to joke about the whole thing, was that each of the burglars must have thought the other one had gotten there first. I tried not to be indelicate about the situation, but certainly thought the thought that there were benefits to being a slob.

It’s slightly difficult to put myself back into that teenage mindset, but I do remember not understanding what the big deal was. I wasn’t sharing the room with anyone, could almost always find what I needed and didn’t have a hygiene problem. It was just disorganized, but to me it worked just fine. I know it was not how my parents wanted their house to look, but no one had to see it.

In fact, I couldn’t even see it. I couldn’t see how much energy I was using trying to sustain that degree of mess. Constantly looking for things buried under piles. The scene became ‘normal’, like a background you no longer notice.

I know my daughter does not see her mess. She will literally stand in a room littered with her clothes and look up at me, questioning what exactly I wanted her to pick up. Not until I point out the individual items, or sometimes an entire section, does she realize. I think about how something so visible, so pointed and blaring, could be overlooked.

Of course, this is how it always happens, isn’t it? A group of people each have a different telling of the scene they just saw. I see the forest and you see the trees. The difference, I believe, is the pair of lenses we are looking through and the meaning-making machine that runs the translation. I know that pink bra is not hurting anyone. Heck, it might even be decorative. but it represents defiance, which translates into an indictment of my parenting skills. And my ability to take care of my house. And my ability to take care of myself. It is a slap in the face of responsible adulthood.

Every time I walk by the offensive bra, it becomes brighter, bigger, and more inflammatory. Every time my daughter walks by it, it grows more undetectable. Invisible-er, as it were.

I wonder how much of our lives are run this way. Where the thing that glares the brightest in your universe is invisible to the others around you. Where your mess means nothing, but their mess means everything. How powerful would it be to use another set of eyes, and see the world that way? How liberating would it be to not ascribe motive and meaning to other’s actions? Tweet that. 

I don’t have to choose to see my daughter’s actions as defiance. I can just ask her to pick up her bra. Simple enough, right?

What shift has to happen in what YOU see? Tell me below.

 

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What I Carry: Final Tales from Alonnisos

I carry the places I’ve been like a layer of fine silk that initially sits on the surface and eventually absorbs into the fabric of my being.

 

I carry with me the sights of beauty and sometimes tragedy that I always fail miserably to capture on camera. I invite in the different flavors of what passes my lips and fills my body.

 

I carry the feeling of sheets so different from the flannel that graces my own bed year round, and the pressure of the water droplets from an unfamiliar shower.

 

I carry with me the words, laughter and soft eyes of new and very new friends, some who absorb fully into my flesh and some who wash away with the end of proximity.

 

Sometimes I carry the tender whispers and urgent caresses of lovers. Their residence time is typically longer than most, carried deep into my body by electricity, heat and the miracle of being seen.

 

I carry with me the places I have been blessed to see on this miraculous ride called life. It grows me layer by layer into a being whose porosity allows more of the world in, and more of my soul out.

 

A few hours remain until I begin my journey home from Alonnisos, Greece, a place fairly difficult to get to and impossible to leave.

It represents the unique exception of my decision to not repeat destinations. Coming back for the second year of a very special writing retreat has been one of the best decisions I’ve made. This small, remote island, which feels like a village, has captured my heart.

It’s impossible to walk more than a few steps in the tiny downtown area without familiar (or unfamiliar) faces smiling and saying hello. I am still taken by surprise by all those who remember me from my last visit one year ago, and those I’ve just met who make it a point to connect.

I’m struggling with the idea of leaving. If not for the work responsibilities that call me, and intensely missing my daughter, I would have happily extended my trip another week. Or two.

It’s not hard to imagine why I like it here so much. The physical beauty is undeniable – beaches everywhere you look with improbably crystal blue water. Lush, green mountains perfumed by tropical flowers. Sweet grandmothers who emerge out of restaurant kitchens to make sure your dinner filled your belly and heart. The fact that you know each of the island’s four taxi drivers by name, family and favorite restaurant.

But there are so many remarkable places in the world. Why does this one touch me so profoundly?

Here is what I take back with me, and what will keep bringing me back as long as I can:

The shy young man sitting behind me at a café, who serenades me for hours with his soulful songs, and turns out to be one of the island’s rock stars. His humble request for help with the English lyrics for his new album have cemented our friendship.


The impossibly handsome nightclub owner with whom I’ve gone from sunset to sunrise sharing stories about India, writing, and the spiritual life. And the magic of a tender heart.


The young couple who own my favorite jewelry store on the planet, and bring me into their lives as if I was a newfound Greek cousin.


The owner of the sweet hotel where I stay, who seems to run the whole island, and never fails to ask me about my daughter, my writing, my favorite meals and the gift of what this magical place has given me.

 

To live in this way forms a space between unimaginable fullness and the freedom of weightlessness in which I can dance, grounded and unbounded.

 

I carry it all, and pray it will stay with me.

 

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